19 May 1998: More Rail Gaming

Tuesday, 19 May 1998:

More Rail Gaming

Last night I got together with a couple of guys to play rail games again, this time Australian Rails, also in the Empire Builder series. You may recall that last week when we did this we got started late, and ended up finishing rather later than I'd have preferred.

This time, everyone showed up on time, and it looked like we'd be underway by 6:15 pm. However, we had a change of plans and went over to one of the guys' apartment so their wives could join us in a 5-player game. We had dinner first, so we didn't get underway until after 7:30, and by 10:00 a few of us were feeling a little wiped out, so we aborted the game. Oh, well. I'll probably try again in a couple of weeks and see if we can get started earlier.

It was a good game, though. Australian Rails is probably my favorite variant of the system, although both Eurorails and North American Rails are excellent.

After gaming, I spent the late evening and much of this evening doing some life reconstruction. I did a load of laundry and a load of dishes, and some cleaning up, all before bed last night. Tonight I took out trash, got my bike's flat tire fixed, did our weekly fantasy baseball results (I slipped from 6th to 7th, but I'm gradually feeling better about my team), and so forth. I also got the good news by e-mail that my new Macintosh is on its way to me by UPS.

This evening I finished reading Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue. As I've said, it's a pretty relentlessly brutal book in its portrayal of the oppression of women in its future society, though despite that it seems even a little shallow in its portrayal - many little things around the edges seem a little too hazy and abstract. The book's premise involves these women developing their own language as a tool to help overcome their quandary, but it, too, is handled rather abstractly. I would have enjoyed it more, I think, if the language had been explored in more depth, with more detail in the linguistics that went into it (apparently Elgin actually worked out the language, so the detail existed, but it's not in the book). I don't know whether I'll tackle the two sequels - especially since I've only ever seen one of them!

I took some steps today to make things a little more fun at work. For the last few years, I've been the primary caretaker of the system we use to track and coordinate our development. The system is pretty neat in a lot of ways, but it's all character-based (i.e., VT100 terminal emulation; really!) and although Epic has some good tools for such development (since that was the sort of software Epic developed until the early 90s) it certainly has some limitations because of it.

Today I got together with a couple of other people to talk about moving the system into GUI, since Epic is now developing various advanced tools in Visual Basic which interface with our home-grown database system. We have some ideas for some neat Web-based interfaces, and ways to tie together many different administrative systems we have throughout the company into one application. I think this will be very cool and fun to work on ("the most fun you can have without hacking a system kernel"), and I want to start working on it within the next week or so.

I'm kind of disappointed that Visual Basic's class system doesn't support inheritance, though. Not surprised, mind you, but disappointed. With any luck, in four or five years everyone will be developing in Rhapsody, instead.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)